Expert warns against nitric oxide

BIRMINGHAM, Ala., May 30 (UPI) -- A U.S. professor of anesthesiology advises consumers to ignore new products claiming to contain nitric oxide because "nitric oxide is a toxic gas."

"Walk in to any health food store, and you'll see new products claiming to contain nitric oxide -- they don't," Jack R. Lancaster of the University of Alabama at Birmingham said in a statement. "Nitric oxide is a toxic gas."

The interest in nitric oxide stems from a 1987 discovery that the body naturally produces a harmless amount of the substance, which is essential to a number of bodily functions, such as controlling the delivery of oxygen to by blood to the tissues, according to Lancaster.

The store products do not contain nitric oxide, but they do contain arginine -- the substance from which nitric oxide is naturally produced, says Lancaster.

The arginine effect is not due to the arginine acting as the source of nitric oxide, but instead as a stimulator to the outside of the cell that sends a message into the cell to increase nitric oxide formation, according to the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.